1994 could never be called a dull year but after packing away my ailing Mega Drive and putting on my finest stripy jumper for Kurt Cobain’s funeral, I needed to be diverted by a great game. Quite fittingly UFO: Enemy Unknown aka X-COM came along just as OJ’s white Bronco was trying for orbit.
X-COM UFO: Enemy Unknown UFO: Enemy …

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If only games were this difficult these days. I can't actually remember completing this game, but I do remember how bloody hard it was. Terror From The Deep was also good too, but didn't really add much.

And don't know why it wasn't mentioned, but you can relive the X-Com games through Steam for only £2.99 a pop, or £8.99 for the pack.

if only

Difficult

It became fairly easy after I played it a million times, some of those times being quite recently. I loved it anyway. The secret was to sell almost everything that you recovered from the ground missions, plus a lot of your starting stocks as well. Go straight for heavy plasma, hire 50 soldiers and immediately sack all but the best shooters, then you're ready to kick some alien arse.

Is it usable outside of Windows?

The Steam system requirements list Windows 2000/XP/Vista but also "Sound Cards Supported: AdLib compatible cards, SoundBlaster compatible cards and the Roland LAPC-1". So does it come in a form where I could transfer it to DosBox on another platform?

Thanks for that

Title

Two words

I loved this series

This XCOM games were brilliant, from a time when gameplay mattered more than graphics.

My favourite tactic late on in the game was to send out hover tanks to recce the alien crash sites. Then using my psionic troopers to make the aliens drop their weapons and then walk them back to my ship where I would line them up and execute them.

Psionics

My favourite use of psionics was to scout for other aliens (out of sight) and control them as well so that my Men/Women never had to go anywhere and I could get the aliens to bitch-slap themselves :)

I loved the guideable rocket hovertanks though ... useful with big ships and men with jet-packs.

send the jetpacks to the roof of the big ship, get one man to open the door at the bottom and walk away, a man into the lift shaft to open the door at the top, then leave the ship then rocket grenade from a safe distance into the lift shaft, up to the top, along the open corridor and into the roof/far wall near to my hovering men ... men fly in through the new doorway and waste/capture anyone in that room ...

Great Game,

A true classic

I lost so many hours hunting around crash sites looking for the last alien, they were always very good at hiding.

Other highlights were the flying missle tank (urban crash site missions are much easier when you can fly up the outside of buildings) and the hardcore Mars Attacks type alien in the purple cloak who used mind control to wipe out your entire squad in one turn *grrr*.

The underwater sequel never really clicked for me, but the German remake that was around a couple of years ago was a good attempt, shame about the dodgy camera angles.

Memories

Yay X-COM!

Good times playing X-COM.

Happy times, like reducing an entire city block to smouldering ruins to root out one of those horrible superfast parasite buggers.

And sad times… like having my entire team fire rockets and machine guns into a barn for 6 turns to kill one Sectoid, and failing. I then screamed abuse at my team for failing to hit the broadside of a barn… the fact of the matter is they could hit the barn, evidenced by the fact it had a great many holes in its walls… as well as that it was on fire. They just couldn’t hit the part the nasty little alien was hiding behind.

Insult was added to property damage when the little sod strode out into the open took a long shot at my best agent who was hiding behind a large stone wall and clocked him dead, then proceeded to survive everything I threw at him for another turn before falling unconscious from smoke inhalation.

I don't know which is the sadder...

says:

An absolute classic. The only issue I found, rectified with Terror From The Deep, was the fairly obvious research path.

When I was taking the fight back to Mars I was distressed to find one of the map tile files on the floppy disk was corrupted and made further progress impossible as I couldn't navigate around the flashing blobbyness where they appeared on the map. I had to hack about in a clean tile and make my own replacement. This replacement tile may have been a little more XCOM friendly than the original, especially as I made it a simple straight corridor too narrow for the aliens' hovers to negotiate.

Superb

One of my all time favourites, although very difficult to finish at the higher difficulty settings. TftD was also fun but became a bit of a slog after a while because the bases were just so big. A friend of mine, Scott Jones, produced a series of patches mainly aimed at making it even more difficult but I do remember one of them allowed you to play the aliens.

Best. Game. Ever.

Honestly, nothing else has come close to this for me - remember firing the demo up on my dads work laptop as a kid, and getting giddy as hell! The only thing that bugged me was that they dropped the laser effect (it sort of blew out a load of pixels on a hit) from the full game, shoulda stayed.

Agree - android version would be immense, though possibly end up with me getting the sack for never working...

Surely..

this is crying out for an iPad release??? It'd be epic. Don't change a thing except perhaps update the graphics a bit and make it a "little" easier?? I remember the tension of sending my team into a site, creeping around hunting down those damn aliens but as with others remember I didn't get close to finishing it as it was to flippin hard!!

Still on my shelf

Have both Enemy Unknown and Terror from the Deep (both PS1), and both played regularly even now; completed EU but could never complete TFTD -still trying and although the graphics look dated, still more than acceptable on my HDTV thro the PS3. Who'd have thunk: gameplay beating shiny graphix

TFTD

I was just too young for enemy unknown, but I remember seeing the review and getting the demo of TFTD in PC Format (I still have that issue of the mag in the loft somewhere) and salivating over it for months before I could afford to buy the game. I must have played the demo hundreds of times.

I never completed the damn thing until about 2 years ago though, got it loaded up in DosBox and had a great time. It's pretty difficult, although I learned recently that there are a few bugs in the research tree which can catch you out and make it impossible to finish the game, thus adding to the frustration! They may have been patched now, officially or unofficially.

Definitely still one of my all-time favourites though, and when I've finished Settlers 3 I might dig it out again...

Excellent game...

Anyone else make the mistake of renaming your soldiers, becoming quite attached to them and getting very upset if they died. I seem to remember if you killed the PC quickly enough after your best guy was shot, it wouldn't save and you could restart the mission!

You missed one

Well, two actually - Chaos and its sequel, Lords of Chaos. LoC was if anything even better than Laser Squad: you were able to choose the units for your side on the fly and also use a variety of powerful direct attacks and board changing effects, but the more units you had, the less power you had left to use combat spells.

XCom Util

Near perfect.

Bought it again on Steam for pennies the other month, thought I'd breeze through it having finished it when it first came out; was quickly and brutally reminded how sodding difficult it is if you are too gung-ho, particularly in the early stages.

Slap some spiffy new graphics on the top of it and re-release it - would be better than YAFPS.

Remakes and tributes

There's an open source game called UFO: Alien Invasion ( http://ufoai.sf.net ) which tries to follow in x-com's footsteps, definitely worth checking out if you are a fan of the original. Play it or contribute to it, or do both.

Brilliant game

Fondly remember playing this for many hours, and enjoying playing it again when I got it off steam. The first was a brilliant game, if very difficult. Terror from the Deep was actually fiendishly difficult, some of those aliens (the crab people and the things that implanted eggs in your guys no matter what armour they were wearing) were ridiculously overpowered. The sense of achievement from beating a mission was immense.

Apocalypse is very enjoyable too - I'm playing that again, and UFO:Afterlight (on Mars) is actually a really good game as well. Aftermath is shoddy and we don't mention any of the other UFO titles, they didn't happen.

Agree: Best. Game. Ever.

Loved this game, lost loads of sleep, even started dreaming it was really happening! (which is not quite as sad as dreaming about rescuing tiny blue Lemmings with green hair)

Never quite got into intercepter and only recently tried giving apocalypse a proper go (not got far yet, just not *quite* the same feeling, maybe I prefer the turn based aspect rather than the real time bit)

Did get very excited for the Xcom Alliance trailer only to get heartbroken when it never made it to release.

Would love even just a variation of the original game with modern graphics (last time I checked out the fan versions they did at the time seem very much only half finished but that was a long time ago now... any get nearly complete? I will look at the links posted above when home)

Yes please to iOS and Andriod versions (iOS first though please! ;-) )

Chuckle at remebering some of the tackics mentiond above and grimiced at remembering situations where best squad members or whole squads wiped out by one difficult alien ( and yes I did often redo a mission from the previous save point when I had learnt the lesson to create save points just before mission start (in case really horrid layout) and just after! (to avoid losing good squad members)

Could be quite slow to build up your defenses if you don't use the Cheat/patcher to increase starting funds..

awesome game

sadly the latest 'sequel' looks utterly terrible. lets take an excellent tactical turn based squad shooter, with research and development, and rpg bits, and remake it into what looks like a generic FPS (and it doesnt look like its very good even at that). yay.

TFTD was fun, but very much like EU - the research paths were near identical, iirc.

Apoc was pretty good, and i liked how they progressed the storyline, and kept similar gameplay - whilst updating it for a more modern audience.

interceptor... i quite liked interceptor. theres not many flight sims i like, but the combination of a fun storyline, and the R&D stuff, made it pretty much unique as far as i'm aware.

enforcer... i played once, and it was awful.

now, as for the 'spiritual successors'....

ufo: afterlight/aftermath/aftershock.... not bad games tbh, but didnt have the charm of the originals. also fairly buggy and unresponsive iirc.

a few people have mentioned ones above, which i wont comment on as i've not played them.

i have been playing UFO:Extraterrestrials lately (and a sequel is out soonish), which captures a lot of the the essence of the originals, imo. the feeling of being utterly outclassed is certainly there, along with the research and your squad improving (if they last long enough!). controls are a bit iffy, and theres a few bugs, but nothing gamebreaking.